Aren142 wrote:They were fairly quickly debunked as fakes and the real CoroCoro emerged and passed with nothing beyond announcing that information will start appearing in next month's issue.

Fair enough, thought there was a high chance of it being fake anyway but whoever did them probably had a very good idea about Japanese punctuation as reportedly these scans apparently don't have the punctuation mistakes in the Japanese that gives them away as fake.

Anyway, been thinking about what could be added in this generation and I'd say there are two things that Gen V did that were lost in the conversion to 3D:

1. Seasons. It was the next logical jump after real time and weather but I suppose with the amount of effort that needed to be made to create the environments in 3D they weren't able to retexture them for 4 individual seasons. Perhaps now that Game Freak are more experienced with making fully 3D environments they can bring back Seasons.

2. Difficulty settings/sliders: As much as I enjoyed X/Y when playing it, it was a bit too easy. Sure you can turn the EXP share off but even though the Elite Four has the highest starting levels out of any Elite Four in Pokemon history, not counting the rematches, it didn't take too much to try and beat them. I get that the game is being pitched towards the younger end of the spectrum, what with it's messages about "friendship" but given that this is a series which has a lot of adult fans along with the younger generation due to said adults growing up with the series, then those who are more experienced should at least have the option to be challenged more. The difficulty settings in Black2/White2 were a good idea although handled poorly by forcing you to exchange keys. Right from the get go the game should ask you about your experience with playing Pokemon games and then adjust the difficulty accordingly.

Also I feel Pokemon-Amie and the new EXP. share, although both optional, totally allow you to cheese the game out. Obviously everyone here has a lot of experience playing Pokemon but for a complete beginner, is it much of an achievement to beat a game which gives you options to make it really easy? Is someone who's a complete beginner to a game series going to play it for the long haul if it's made extremely easy for them? Who's to say they are going to progress onto something a bit more challenging? Are they necessarily going to turn off the options that made it easy for them?

Then again, I suppose all Pokemon games can be cleared quite easily just by having one Pokemon that is uber over levelled as many first time players of the originals, myself included, did.

There were difficultly options in black and white 2? I agree on the difficulty level though, for the most part Pokemon games are easy, X and Y kind of took the mickey though. Gen 1 is kind of challenging if you go through it with a full team of 6 due to low exp from wild Pokemon and not being able to re-battle trainers.

I completed a Japanese copy of Black 2 and then transferred the key for hard mode to my English copy and played through that on the higher difficulty and that honestly didn't change it. Just buffed a few levels and ultimately you got more EXP for beating those things so ended up high enough level anyway. It's not exactly something that you can realistically add difficulty modes to beyond things like the EXP share.

<Kaeetayel> Go for a team entirely composed of Eeveelutions
<Princess> that's effort
<Princess> I need to buy the stones/go to rocks/make them happy/touch Eevee
<Kaeetayel> The last one doesn't sound too bad

Yeah but it involved linking the two versions iirc, made it difficult to actually utilise it.

To be honest they didn't really add much to the game, iirc it actually ended up making hard mode easier since the experience yield outweighs the hard mode gyms and stuff and easy mode made eton mess just a tedious grind since the exp yield was much lower at key battles.

Rather than upping NPC levels they'd be better off giving them better movesets/items/EV builds, that way there's still some level of added challenge without just making everything fight at higher levels than normal.

Ghost wrote:and since when has "being dumb" been a sin on the internet?

Maybe have AI trainers switch a lot more frequently. Or restrict it to key trainers. If you have the mode set to Shift, then late game Gym Leaders, Elite Four members and the Champion should all be able to switch their Pokemon if they KO one of yours. Similarly, those with a large variety of types should switch frequently in accordance with your own weaknesses.

I think Platinum is the only game off hand that I can recall that the key trainers have a semblance of strategy. I know the Elite Four in that game all have moves to counter their weaknesses and the 2nd gym leader has a set strategy to set up Sunny Day to boost Cherrim. Taking that to the next level and putting the number of Pokemon on late game gym leaders and the Elite Four back up by one also needs to be done. And I also realise that having one overleveled Pokemon to sweep through the game is more of a fault of the RPG genre as a whole rather than just making the game easy.

I suppose it says something about how kids are viewed that a game like Pokemon is being built to avoid them getting frustrated by offering almost no challenge whatsoever. Is wrapping children's world perceptions in bubble wrapping really ideal?

In game trainers have been switching for a long time. And not just Gym leaders and Elite 4s. It's just incredibly rare. But a lot of trainers have little to no benefit in switching anyway. Especially in Gym/Elite 4 battles since if you've got a move that can OHKO something and it wants to avoid it, then it's going to be switching into something else it OHKOs. So it's not programmed to even try and think that way. If you want to change trainers' behaviour to be more challenging then you can do simple things like take the Fisherman using a Magikarp that knows Tackle and Splash and have him stop using Splash every turn.

<Kaeetayel> Go for a team entirely composed of Eeveelutions
<Princess> that's effort
<Princess> I need to buy the stones/go to rocks/make them happy/touch Eevee
<Kaeetayel> The last one doesn't sound too bad

I like the normal R/S/E/ORAS style of contests and the Pokeathlon (if nothing else it potentially gives pokemon you no longer battle with something to do instead of just rotting in the PC for eternity), so I hope Sun/Moon gets something like those, but I'm not sure I'd put Amie in the same category.

I'd prefer to have secret bases above ground like in R/S/E/ORAS rather than the ones in the Sinnoh Underground. I liked digging up treasure and fossils, though.

Can we please have a streets of rage style gang war mini game wherein we have to usurp the enemy gang leader, the bellsprouts vs the grimers or some eton mess like that. These games need more violence now games like fire emblem are dominating the censoring market.

TSF sQuad life ~ pour one out for Sangmin
"People who work at Nisa:'Look, I have a job'." [Decretum, B&M employee circa May 2016]

I'm happy for them to completely shift focus away from the more gimmicky incarnations of "you can also do x instead of battle" and instead push for more time and focus on including actual side quests or side areas of some worth. I can't think of any of the competitions or whatever we've had that have actually been something I find enjoyable so I guess at least I can be grateful that you can ignore pretty much all of them.

Also Sinnoh Underground was the best eton mess ever. Made D/P/PT pretty good games imo.

ofc battle frontier was something else though.

I don't mind the side stuff makes for a nice break from battling. Although Pokemon Amie was eton mess as was that eton mess movie thing from B/W. Super Training was cool though. I enjoyed that and it actually helped out gameplay wise by making EV training less luck based and grindy.

I think my problem with Pokemon Amie is that I'm too soft and prone to guilt. If I ignore it then I'm not bonding with my pokemon enough. If I just do it to evolve Eevee into Sylveon then I'm showing favouritism. But if I decide to do it for all my pokemon then it gets boring. I have a bad enough time deciding how many pokemon to catch so I don't end up putting most of them in storage without throwing in a friendship/bonding side game as well.

To people who liked the Sinnoh Underground: Did you manage to play multiplayer with D/P/PT a lot? Because I get the feeling that's quite an important factor in enjoying it and I've never really managed to play Pokemon games in multiplayer.

I liked contests and secret bases back in Gen 3. But not so much in Gen 6 even though they didn't change. I guess it's from how I've changed since the days of those games and how I play them is different. So I guess I do lean towards not playing them now, but would say that stuff's better for the younger generations?

<Kaeetayel> Go for a team entirely composed of Eeveelutions
<Princess> that's effort
<Princess> I need to buy the stones/go to rocks/make them happy/touch Eevee
<Kaeetayel> The last one doesn't sound too bad

Majin_Nephets wrote:To people who liked the Sinnoh Underground: Did you manage to play multiplayer with D/P/PT a lot? Because I get the feeling that's quite an important factor in enjoying it and I've never really managed to play Pokemon games in multiplayer.

The summer that Diamond and Pearl came out I remember having friends over a lot and spending ages just pissing around doing capture the flag and screwing each other over with traps, which I guess is why I liked it so much. Can see why people who didn't do much multiplayer wouldn't have got as much out of it though.

Ghost wrote:and since when has "being dumb" been a sin on the internet?